that humans should aim to be indepen- dent/self-reliant in all aspects of their lives. . . I don't think true independence is a realistic ideal given all the inher- en t in tertwinings of any society") to the geekily flirtatious ("I'm a neurotic painter from Ohio, and I guess if you consider your views radical, then I'm a radical, too. So ... we should be friends") . Wikipedians have evolved a distinc- tive vocabulary, of which "revert," meaning "reinstate"-as in "I reverted the edit, but the user has simply re- reverted it"-may be the most com- monly used word. Other terms include WikiGnome (a user who keeps a low profile, fixing typos, poor grammar, and broken links) and its antithesis, WikiTroll (a user who persistentlyvio- lates the site's guidelines or otherwise engages in disruptive behavior). There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy- two), bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedi- ans, existential Wikipedians, pro- Lux- embourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedi- ans who don't like to be categorized. According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict "computer programmers, aca- demics, graduate students, gameshow contestants, news junkies, the unem- ployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories." You may travel in more exalted circles, but this covers pretty much everyone I know. Wikipedia may be the world's most ambitious vanity press. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred-fewer than two per cent-are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. The site allows you to compare contributors by the number of edits they have made, by the number of articles that have been judged by community vote to be outstanding (these "featured" articles often appear on the site's home page), and by hourly activity, in graph form. A seventeen-year-old P. G. Wode- house fan who specializes in British peerages leads the featured -article pack, with fifty-eight entries. A twenty-four- year-old University of Toronto gradu- ate is the site's premier contributor. 40 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 31, 2006 OUR. FLOWER.S Mter the storm white and black clouds hung in the sky like dogs and cats drinking out of the same blue bowl. It has been so long since we danced, not counting the slow shuffie at the Zoo Ball, you in the black tie the valet knotted in the parking lot after the Internet instructions failed. "Failure" is such a beautiful word for something lousy, the lure of it not at all like the rain, the drenching rain after the long hot drought that ended today. When you said you loved substations, I thought of long sandwiches until across the street I saw the electricity-making equipment you'd already started naming the parts of: I wanted to name the clouds- dogwood, tiger lily, lilac, the lost flowers of my girlhood, and of course the thousands of blossoms of pWox in the rock garden my impossibly young grandmother sat in for the photograph with three stone ducks. What if we went back, as children, to where no one asks how long the blooms will bloom, to sleep with our grandmothers in the feather bed carried from the old country, all of us dreaming our own painful music, the songs that will wake us in time for the next storm, and even ifit brings down limbs and live wires dancing in wild arcs, we'll watch the wind rouse the trees while the petals of where we belong blow down to rain on the unkissably muddy ground. Since composing his first piece, on the Panama Canal, in 2001, he has written or edited more than seventy- two thousand articles. "Wikipedi- holism" and "editcountitis" are well defined on the site; both link to an article on obsessive-compulsive disor- der. (There is a Britannica entry for O.C.D., but no version of it has in- cluded Felix Unger's name in the third sentence, a comprehensive survey of "OCD in literature and film," or a list of celebrity O.C.D. sufferers, which unites, surely for the first time in his- tory, Florence Nightingale with Joey Ramone. ) One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Ess- -Barbara Ras jay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to arti- cles in his field-on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends. (To his knowl- edge, he has never met another Wiki- pedian, and he will not be attending Wikimania, the second international gathering of the encyclopedià s contrib- utors, which will take place in early Au- gust in Boston.) Gradually, Essjay found himself de- voting less time to editing and more to correcting errors and removing obscen- ities from the site. In May, he twice re- moved a sentence from the entry on Justin Timberlake asserting that the pop star had lost his home in 2002 for failing to pay federal taxes-a state-